Dumas: What's the deal with Superman?

Updated 5:50 pm, Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Superman made his first appearance on April 18, 1938. He is now 75 years old.

As a kid, I never liked Superman. As an adult, I can't say I ever got over my initial 9-years-old reservation. Yet, the latest Superman film, "Man of Steel," just earned $113 million in its opening weekend at the box office.

So the new Superman, played last time out by somebody named Brandon Routh, this time by an English actor named Henry Cavill, joins other superheroes as movie mega-hits, like "Iron Man 3," "Batman," and "Spiderman," all comic book heroes whose allure also eluded me in the vague, mysterious past.

A question was well-put a couple of days ago by an interested observer of the superhero scene: "How is it that Batman and the rest of the caped crusaders are such big hits in today's movie houses, when -- let's face it -- they were only minor players on the comics scene when they appeared in print?" The man has a point -- could part of the answer be a lack of competition? A lowering of standards on the part of 15-year-old movie-goers?

The first comic book I ever bought was "The Green Lantern" in 1940. I don't think he had a cape. I don't know what he had. I never bought another copy, partly because dimes were hard to come by in those days. I also remember, vividly, sitting on my front porch in Detroit reading an early Superman comic book (Action Comics, published by DC, which stood for Detective Comics). If I still had that comic book, written and drawn by the Superman creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, out of Cleveland, I could sell it for upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would have to be in mint condition, of course. It was neither well-written nor well-drawn, and nobody knows why such pedestrian work is worth so much money but that's what rich collectors like to do.

That summer day on the front porch, my Uncle Ed happened to be visiting. He was my father's eldest brother, the oldest of 17 children, and he was a real life Superman. He was 6-feet-4, weighed about 230 pounds and there was no fat. He had run away from home at 16, traveled the world working in the engine rooms of tramp steamers, had only one working eye, and was the only one of our extended family my mother couldn't shut up.

As I studied a drawing of Superman hoisting a trolley car above his head, Uncle Ed leaned over my shoulder. After a moment, he asked, "Do you believe this stuff?"

No, and neither did any of my buddies, comic strip fans all, but none of us were much into Captain America, Captain Marvel (aren't there any corporals?), the Flash, the Human Torch, or, God help us, the Black Canary. In a word, the stories couldn't help but be repetitive, and the drawing ranged from lumbering to grotesque. None of the comic books compared with the newspapers' Prince Valiant or Terry and the Pirates or Roy Crane's masterful Buz Sawyer. This was the 1940s and `50s -- more recently, there has been, for several of the heroes, drawing of a high caliber.

"Why does Superman have a cape? Why does it swirl out around him when he's standing in an office? When he undresses in a phone booth, how does he know his clothes will still be there when he gets back? Where is the cape bunched up when he's Clark Kent in a business suit? Can he fly when he's wearing the suit with the costume underneath?

To these and many other questions, Curt would smile blandly and say, "I haven't the faintest. Pauline! Could you put a little brandy in this coffee?"

Jerry Dumas is a writer and cartoonist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The New Yorker and other periodicals. He lives in Greenwich.